The Call That Ruined Us

The day Andrew Lawson tells his wife he is bankrupt, a phone call reaches her from ten years in the future. A boy claims to be Andrew's only son, born not to her but to Megan Brooks, and shows her an image of herself a decade older, hollow and locked away in the Briarwood psychiatric facility. She refuses to believe it, remembering how Andrew once risked his life to save her from an earthquake and gave his own blood when she was near death.

Yet small things begin to betray him. A packed container of chicken soup sits in the kitchen, and Andrew mentions a pregnancy she never told him about. When she follows him downstairs, she hears a woman's voice asking when she and the baby can come home, and a child's voice that sounds like the boy on the phone. Andrew turns, and the warmth in his eyes is gone.

She falls down the stairs, and in the hospital he tells her their child is lost and her uterus removed. Even if Andrew could choose again, she understands, he would not choose her.